Gothic Tales (2 page)

(Readers are advised that this Introduction makes some of the plots explicit.)

In a letter to Eliza ‘Tottie' Fox dated 29 May 1849, Elizabeth Gaskell triumphantly proclaims, ‘I
SAW
a ghost! Yes I did; though in such a matter of fact place as Charlotte St I should not wonder if you are sceptical.'
1
This juxtaposition of the ghastly and the everyday suggests one of the defining characteristics of the Gothic genre, that of the uncanny double, the shadowy world that is the complex underbelly of familiar experience. Gaskell can be seen to exploit the idea of mirror opposites in the very form of her fiction; it could be suggested that her pleasurably eerie short stories and novellas collected here represent the darkly surreal depths of her more overtly political and realistic novels
Mary Barton
(1848) and
North and South
(1855).
2
Gaskell's interest in ghosts and Gothic fiction is well documented.
3
One of her first pieces of published work was ‘Clopton Hall', a reworking of an atmospheric essay she had written while at Avonbank School in Stratford-upon-Avon, published in 1840 by her friend William Howitt in his collection
Visits to Remarkable Places.
4
This short piece, like the stories collected here, indicates Gaskell's playful exploration not just of the supernatural, but of other Gothic themes and motifs such as the doubled identity, the discovered manuscript, and the conflict with history and forms of authority. In Gaskell's Gothic scenarios, it is usually the female characters who are victimized by the males, and it is this investment in exposing the conflict between the powerful and the powerless that links these stories and novellas most explicitly with the themes of her better-known full-length works. However, although Gaskell may be said to be most fully engaged in exposing social and political injustice, as the pieces collected here demonstrate,
there is a marked tension between the categories of factual sources and fictionalized narratives, between stories which empower the self and stories which oppress the Other. Part of what constitutes the Gothic experience in these stories is the split between different forms of identity and between different forms of authority – in terms of gender, history and textuality – and how those boundaries are themselves transgressed. In Gaskell's stories and novellas, what has been repressed continues to return, fact continually merges into fiction, and it is these shifts between what is real and what is imagined – seeing that ghost in the everyday street – that makes these stories so compelling.

One of the fundamental contradictions inherent in these stories is, of course, the character of the writer herself. All of the pieces collected here, except for ‘The Doom of the Griffiths', were originally published anonymously, all but two in Charles Dickens's
Household Words
and
All the Year Round.
Her first three stories, however – ‘Libbie Marsh's Three Eras' (1847), ‘The Sexton's Hero' (1847) and ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine' (1848) – first appeared in
Howitt's Journal
and were published under the name ‘Cotton Mather Mills, Esq.', a provocative and witty pseudonym.
5
It links her commitment to contemporary Manchester industry (the cotton mill) with the New England clergyman, scholar and, most notoriously, witch-hunter. One of Cotton Mather's most influential works was
Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions
(1685), and he himself makes a notable appearance in Gaskell's story ‘Lois the Witch', when he arrives in Salem to assist in the purging and judging of ‘witches'. Gaskell's identity as writer under this name is thus a curious hybrid of Unitarian and Puritan, English and American, Victorian and seventeenth century, and crucially calls into question the relationship between fiction and history, female and male identities, and a sense of the comic within more serious concerns.

In her
Life of Charlotte Brontë
, Gaskell explicitly refers to her ambivalence about the differences between the freedom with which men can pursue a career in writing, and the oppressive weight of responsibilities that interferes with the same pursuit for women:

When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change of employment to him. He takes a portion of that time which has hitherto been devoted to some other study or pursuit… and another… steps into his vacant place, and probably does as well as he. But no other can take up the quiet, regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she whom God has appointed to fill that particular place: a woman's principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed. And yet she… must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others.
6

There is a melancholic realization here, it seems, in Gaskell's recognition of the near-impossibility of compromise between women's responsibilities to others and to themselves and their talents; whereas men, according to Gaskell, are virtually interchangeable in the world of work, and therefore can step out of it at will to pursue their own interests, women, it seems, are inevitably bound to their domestic and social obligations. How, then, can a woman reconcile these with the necessity that she find time to write, though this writing must still be in the ‘service of others'?

In a letter to Eliza Fox written in 1850, Gaskell stresses the point that ‘
Women
, must give up living an artist's life, if home duties are to be paramount.'
7
She then goes on to stress in the same letter the need for a ‘refuge of the hidden world of Art', which women can ‘shelter themselves in when too much pressed upon by daily small Lilliputian arrows of peddling cares'. In fact, she argues that the ‘blending' of ‘Home duties and the development of the Individual' is necessary for the ‘healthy' maintenance of women's commitment to both spheres although, as she sadly concludes, ‘it takes no Solomon to tell you but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other'. In fact, Jenny Uglow suggests that one reason why Gaskell might have chosen to write short pieces for magazines is that she could sneak such work in between completing her commitments to the ‘peddling' work within the domestic sphere.
8
What is so interesting, of course, is that the fiction she wrote, especially ‘Lois the Witch', ‘The Grey Woman', ‘The Poor Clare' and ‘The Old
Nurse's Story', suggests that this domestic arena which Gaskell is so keen to preserve and prioritize is also precisely the place where women are at their must vulnerable and in most danger.

Gaskell's comments suggest, then, that her own split between successful woman writer and committed mother, wife and community provider must have been a constant source of tension and anxiety for her, as it doubtless was for so many other women writers of the nineteenth century. Thus the theme of the Gothic doubling of female identity which recurs so often in Gaskell's fiction – most strikingly represented in ‘The Poor Clare' – could be seen to have its source in Gaskell's own compartmentalized life. Indeed, in yet another letter to Eliza Fox, written in 1850, Gaskell bemoans her multiplicity of selves – Christian, wife, mother and lover of ‘beauty and convenience' – and cries, ‘How am I to reconcile all these warring members?'
9
For Gaskell, at least in these letters, a plurality of identities proves to be neither liberating nor productive, but rather fragmenting and disabling.

Another primary tension in Gaskell's Gothic stories is the way in which they problematize the distinction between history and literature, fact and fiction. One of her early pieces written for Dickens's magazine was actually not a story at all but an article entitled ‘Disappearances', a series of anecdotes about people who have vanished under mysterious circumstances. Gaskell's interest in this phenomenon was prompted, some suspect, by her distress at the disappearance at sea of her brother, John Stevenson, on his way to India.
10
‘Disappearances' is an odd mix of gossip, rumour, local legend and apparent fact, written partly as a response to Dickens's articles on detectives and policework. In fact, it opens with a reference to William Godwin's Gothic tale of disguise and detection,
Caleb Williams
(1794); ‘Disappearances' thus stakes its claim to truth by virtue of its distance from Godwin's fictional account of persecution, though the subtitle ‘Things as They Are' indicates Godwin's serious political intentions. However, Gaskell's utilization of gossip and rumour as the ‘factual' sources of her text undermines her authoritative stance by the very nature of the source material.
11

One of these stories, told to her when she was a young girl, is about a paralysed man who apparently vanished one day while sitting outside in his chair as ‘all the village turned out to the hay-fields'. This story id="page_xv" has been traced to an event in 1768, involving one Owen Parfitt, by William Maskell in his book
Odds and Ends.
Maskell irritably argues, however, that Gaskell's version is ‘distorted and untrue, but apparently resting on the most trustworthy proof of actual knowledge of particular details'.
12
Maskell suggests that the source of Gaskell's story was Dr Samuel Butler, the Bishop of Lichfield, whose position as headmaster of Shrewsbury School was taken over by Maskell's father. In Butler's account, the disappearance takes place in Shropshire, rather than Somerset, one of the discrepancies which leads Maskell to conclude that Gaskell took inappropriate authorial liberties with refashioning the story.
13

Gaskell borrows from history again in the second sketch in ‘Disappearances', where she retells the story of a rent-collection agent who was apparently murdered when he stopped at an inn while carrying the money from the tenants. Years later the innkeeper who had stabbed him confessed on his deathbed, and the police were able to locate the body based on his information. Gaskell's friend Henry Green confirms the factual basis of her story (with a few incidental differences), locating its source in the grim history of Knutsford, the town where Gaskell grew up.
14

Sometimes Gaskell's interest in local legend led her into trouble, however, as in the penultimate story in ‘Disappearances', involving a physician's apprentice who was out dispensing medicine one night then mysteriously disappeared, rumoured to have been carried off by the infamous Burke and Hare for the purposes of dissection. Gaskell's macabre speculations provoked an angry response published in
Household Words
a fortnight later, and another eight months after that; the second article in ‘Chips' confirms that the youth had actually not disappeared at all, but had enlisted in the East India Company, in whose service he had, unfortunately, died of cholera.
15
They also vindicate the family of John Gaunt who, thanks to Gaskell's article, had been assumed by his neighbours to have murdered the unfortunate youth. The responses were followed seven years later by a third, even more damning, entitled ‘Character-Murder'; this notice brings up the story again with the news that some bones had recently been found which were rumoured to belong to the unfortunate medical student,
and goes on to castigate those scandal-mongers in general who persist in defaming the Gaunt family, and Gaskell's article in particular, by which means the story ‘lived and spread, and even found its way into our pages'.
16
‘Character-Murder' so enraged Gaskell that she considered refusing to write any more stories for
Household Words.
17
Thus her playful transgression of the boundaries between fiction and fact proved to have consequences which went far beyond her authorial control.

Further evidence of Gaskell's overlap of the lines separating fiction and history can be seen in ‘The Squire's Story', a light-hearted retelling of the Knutsford local legend of the gentleman housebreaker Edward Higgins in the eighteenth century.
18
Apparently, the real-life Higgins's house stands next to the house where Gaskell lived with her aunt prior to her marriage.
19
In this story, then, fact and fiction are as closely aligned as the homes of the author and the housebreaker.

But perhaps the most blatant example of Gaskell's ‘borrowings' (or even plagiarism) is discovered in her fictionalized account of the witch-hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, in which nineteen people were executed as condemned witches. ‘Lois the Witch' is about a young English woman who leaves her native town of Barford, in Warwickshire (where Gaskell herself went to school), to travel to New England, a religious and psychological journey as well as a geographical one. Gaskell based her story on the persecution of a New England woman, Rebecca Nurse, whose accusation, trial and death are described in
Lectures on Witchcraft
, an analysis of the Salem witch trials written by Charles Upham, the Unitarian minister in Salem in the 1830s.
20
What especially challenges the authenticity of the narrator and of the text itself is Gaskell's decision to insert in her story, word for word, the statement of the Salem jurors who made a public declaration of their guilt and remorse for their complicity in persecuting over seventy-five people, as well as two dogs, on the charges of witchcraft.
21

One other story in this collection, ‘The Doom of the Griffiths', also takes history as its point of departure: the story begins with the narrator's claim that ‘I have always been much interested by the traditions which are scattered up and down North Wales relating to id="page_xvii" Owen Glendower… I fully enter into the feeling which makes the Welsh peasant still look upon him as the hero of his country.' Yet Gaskell's appeal to the historical figure of Glendower is immediately compromised by the narrator's recognition of the oral traditions which proliferated around the popular hero; for these, like Gaskell's own texts, have an inevitable tendency to embellish and ‘improve' upon historical fact. Thus, although Gaskell's short story makes repeated claims to geographical and cultural accuracy,
22
the plot itself is sensationalized, recounting the story of the descendants of Rhys ap Gryfydd, the man reputed to have attempted to assassinate Glendower.
23
The family is then cursed by Glendower, who vows that in its ninth generation, ‘the last male of thy race shall avenge me. The son shall slay the father.' Gaskell's main source of inspiration, then, seems to be Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex
, more than it does a factual account of the descendants of a Welsh hero. Indeed, the young Owen of the ninth generation, sitting in moody isolation and feeling alienated by the arrival of a beautiful, though malicious, stepmother, opens a book by chance at Sophocles' very play, the plot of which he must, inevitably, reproduce in his own life. Thus Gaskell utilizes one of the most common themes of Gothic fiction, the power of ancestral sins to curse and condemn future generations.
24
The idea of ancient themes being repeated in the present is explicit both in Gaskell's reference to ancient Greek drama, and in the repetition of sin in the life of her fictional character, Owen.